


On Monuments.

by Urbenmyth



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: 9 different fear classifications, Academic squabbling, Episode 183 drabble, I in no way came up with, I'm going in the monument I guess, Like, Sounds of brutal peer review, Spoilers for seasons 4 and 5, The Monument, just for this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:56:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27631055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Urbenmyth/pseuds/Urbenmyth
Summary: As the end approaches, the learned of the world agree- something has to be done.The questions of what has to be done, and why, and who's getting their name on the paper about it is sadly less certain.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	On Monuments.

“Hello everyone. Thank you for coming.”

The white-haired man leant back, looking at the assembled occultists around him over his horn-rimmed glasses.

“I know we don’t trust each other. Few do in this business. But this goes beyond trust. I believe Jonah Magnus, a powerful servant of the Eye, is on the brink of performing a full ritual. He’s used the Archivist, another avatar of the Eye, to draw on all the entities at once…”

“Ha! You Brits are still using the Entity theory? No wonder you let this happen!”

“Excuse me?”

The younger man leant forwards, a smug look on his face as he pulled out a sheet of paper covered in dense equations.

“At the Usher Foundation, we don’t use such superstitious nonsense. What has happened, for those still in the dark ages, is that Mr Magnus has found a way to combine all 14 wavelengths of phobomorphic radiation, concentrated into a potentially world-ending beam with the Observation frequency. Luckily, all we need to do is cancel it out with a counter signal…”

“ _ Phobomorphic radiation?! _ What absurd buzzword pseudoscience nonsense is that? No, these are entities and we need to destroy the lynchpin avatar!”

“Of course, Phobomorphic radiation is an absurd idea.” said the old woman from the Pu Songling Research Centre.

“Thank you!”

“We should be looking at this as a massive amount of conceptual weight behind the Piercing Gaze nightmare. A simple attempt to create a countering positive archetype should…”

“You can’t defeat the entities with positive feelings! You need to understand the right Phobomorphic Frequencies!”

“No? Look at the Empty Room nightmare. Regularly defeated by a countering positive archetype- thinking of a family member or loved one. This is well documented.”

“Yes, because the Lonely is driven off by feelings of love!”

“How could mere feelings drive off a supposed god? No, what happens is the core nightmare that makes up the Empty Room is undermined by these feelings…”

“No! It is that positive feelings are a reverse frequency to the Isolation Frequency!”

“Oh! Are we supposed to believe warm fuzzies can drive off all the Entities? Can I walk up to the Desolation and love it to death?!”

“We already know pacifism shields against the Victimisation frequency, and acceptance against the Oblivion frequency! Maybe if so many of us weren’t focused on the opinions of laudanum-addled Victorian nobles and half-starved dream interpreters, we could…”

“PEOPLE!”

The representative of the Nigerian Igbinovia Foundation stood up, his face stern. He was used to squabbling academics, and could shut up this assemblage.

“The world might be ending. We can’t be fighting over theory. We need to concentrate.”

Chastised, the academics finally sat down.

“We need to accept that what is happening is that Mr Magnus is opening a portal into all 14 realms at once, and we need to…”

“Realms?”

“Of course. We regularly see people stumble into the Caverns, the Mists and the Expanse, don’t we? Your very own Smirke talked about how the “Entities” are best described as places.”

“And the Stranger? What kind of place is the  _ Stranger _ ? That is clearly an entity!”

“The Carnival mostly operates through intruders, granted, but reports do show…”

“All of this ontological promiscuity is going to kill us all! All we know  _ for sure _ is that the gifted exist, and that this person gifted with Tell-Me-Everything is soon to get enough power to…”

“Only travelers exist? That’s absurd. How do you explain the tomes, then?”

“The books are written by the gifted! That’s why so many are variants on existing books!”

“No, they are touched by the Divinities!”

“The divinities, huh? You’re  _worshiping_ them over in Australia now?”

“No, we’re just willing to call a Cosmic Force That Holds Dominion what it is! A god! Denying that fact is just willful blindness.”

“Yes, we’ve all heard that before, shortly before someone starts gutting people! I’ve read the papers from the Gerlach Project, all “Faceless Gods” and “Burning Priests”! We can’t be swayed by a group of borderline lucids away from what’s really happening!”

“Which is that the entities are being drawn into our reality!”

“No, it is that the Watchers have symbolically set themselves up as leaders of all the factions!”

“Factions?! What the fuck do you mean factions? What is this nonsense? It’s just esoteric radiation! We just need to reverse it!”

“Look at the Others, or the Hunters! Clearly, groups of similar creatures working together, rather than one overarching being!”

“And the Caging God? Are the coffins and oubliettes having tea parties?!”

“Oh and what are they to you? Sacred Artefacts?!”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

“Yes! They are objects from the Caverns that have ended up in our world!”

“How did we get onto Mr Deep? We need to focus on…”

“Mr Deep!? Jesus! Are you  _ five _ ?”

“Adults are bound in logic. To understand the purely irrational nature of the Horrors, we need to look at them as we did when we were children, without adult assumptions. I went over this in great detail in my paper, if you’d bothered to read it…”

“I don’t read papers about the fucking boogeyman! We need to put aside our superstition and work on a reverse frequency  _ now _ !”

“No, we need to close the doors to the realms!”

“We need to find a positive archetype of privacy…”

“We need to kill the lynchpin avatar…”

“We need…”

“Guys!”

Having sat in the corner during the debates, the representative from the Borges Department Of Occult Studies finally yelled for quiet.

“Where the hell are we?”

Collectively, the academics looked around at the shifting maze they were trapped in. Far above, just visible through a distant skylight, a vast, gazing eye looked down at them.

Fuck.

“Well. No worry. What has clearly happened is that we have been sucked into a Realm. Probably the Labyrinth, based on its form. With my knowledge of the Realms, I’ll find my way out quickly enough. Good luck to the rest of you, though. I wish i could see you explaining  _ this _ with ‘phobomorphic radiation’!”

He laughed as he walked down the left corridor, as previous escapees from the Labyrinth had claimed it never turned right. The young american scientist sneered.

“Easy enough. This is simply massive radiation saturation warping our world to the point of unrecognizability. He’s probably right that it’s Deception frequency, but while _he’s_ trying to find his magic wardrobe out of here, I can just measure the strength of the radiation and find a weak spot!”

One by one, the academics of the major supernatural research groups fanned out. Really, this was fine. Lucky, even. They could escape, and then prove for sure that they and they alone understood the supernatural.

They’d be famous. They’d be respected.

They’d be monumental.

They just had to use their knowledge of the entities and nightmares and frequencies and horrors and factions and deities and temptations and shadows and wells and extensions and all their other self-evidently right theories, and they’d be out in no time.

Filled with overwhelming pride and well-concealed fear, the academics began their escape.

If they were right, after all, it would take no time at all.

**Author's Note:**

> This started off with "why would everyone use a thoery invented by a Victorian Architect" and then went to "Everyone has their own theory and thinks everyone else is stupid".
> 
> Each of the theories explains some things well but not others (the Realm theory explains the Buried but not so much the Stranger, the Deity theory explains the Web but not so much the Corruption, the Faction theory explains the Hunt but not so much the Vast...), and I made sure they're all reasonable from a certain perspective. Which I think is best?
> 
> I'll tell you once I figure out which of these shifting doors is real, ok?


End file.
